Rebecca Haque

Last week, The Daily Star's investigative reportage exposed the work of criminal gangs and henchmen stealing rich top soil from precious arable land to sell to powerful, profiteering brickfield owners.

Memories of my father are keeping me awake tonight. Two hours to Fajr Azan on the Friday before Independence Day.

Pahela Falgun, the first day of spring, did not work its magic of rebirth upon my soul. I felt no quickening, burgeoning re-awakening of the creative spirit in myself, nor did I find it in the natural world around me.

and clothe and feed and succour the ruined, forlorn Rohingya, I cannot but feel anxious for our own swiftly depleting resources.

Incarcerated in the camps in (West) Pakistan after the surrender of General Niazi and the capture of over 90,000 Pakistani soldiers, the Bengali Armed Forces Officers and their families counted the days and months as they eagerly awaited repatriation to their newly liberated motherland.

Did not Joyce Kilmer say, “I have never seen a poem as beautiful as a tree”?

When, in March 1971, my eyes first beheld the radiant facsimile of the flag of Bangladesh – the small handprint of my deltaic

when the well is dry,we learn the worth of water”—Benjamin Franklin

Is there a silver moonstone for me

Springtime in Melbourne, her fifth time in this abode of blood-ties and new generation, but her first in this season of renewal.

The diurnal and the nocturnal gyrations of the earth, the magnetic and gravitational attraction and repulsion of the celestial spheres

Potters and weavers and metalworkers and goldsmiths create dazzling, intricately-designed artifacts praised and highly prized by all who look upon them. Every harvest, or spring, autumn, and winter festival is a colourful carnival, with music and dance and ritual offerings and prayers.

LITERATURE on commemoration has rapidly grown in the past twenty years. Scholars from a variety of disciplines, for example, from archeology, architecture, history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, geography – and the more inclusive field under the rubric of Cultural Studies – are mapping the significance and role of “memory “. Commemoration is defined as a “call to remembrance“.

Look into your hearts, and hold fast to your strengths. Hunt down the demons, and rid our land of sickness and filth. Stand tall and be counted. Practice what you preach.

As a public servant working in a public university, I take umbrage at the sharp disdain and negativity displayed by a faculty member of